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Saturday, March 16, 2013

Paraphrase Activity

I know it has been a loooong time since I have posted something. I actually decided to take a break from my school blog because I wanted to spend more time with my family and between this blog and my family one, I just wasn't making that happen.

I figured I would pop on real quick to say hi, see how you all are doing and share an activity with you.

A few months ago, I introduced a new activity to my students. I hadn't tried it before and was curious how my second graders would do. I found this idea on Pinterest. The idea was to have children summarize a story and then paraphrase what they wrote onto smaller cards.

Here is how it worked in my room:

I read the story, The Mitten.

Without telling them the other parts of the activity, I had them go off in small groups and summarize what I just read to them.

I then showed them a smaller card and said they now had to fit that summary onto the new card and couldn't use the back. I had a lot of smiles and shocked reactions but we went on to discuss how they might be able to accomplish this. We talked about how to reword their writing(paraphrase it) so it could fit without losing the main details of the story. I then sent them off in their groups to get to work.

They came back to the carpet and I showed them the final card which was significantly smaller than the original one. After more smiles and shocked reactions, they went off one more time to paraphrase the story even more so it fit this card.

After we came back together and discussed the activity, we took all three cards and put them together so they could see how their main summary compared to the paraphrased ones.

They really enjoyed the activity and I was very proud of how they did!